The damage and loss caused by attacks and security breaches have drawn attentions to develop secure and reliable systems for computing platforms, including mobile and embedded systems.
Computer attacks and security breaches can seriously impact target devices by performing unauthorized modification to the operating system (OS) kernel or critical programs, like user processes or system management daemons, which run inside the target system. In particular, modifying the OS kernel could allow malicious attackers to have an unlimited access to the whole system.
These challenges present a need for developing unconventional solutions that are well isolated from the running OS yet capable of actively monitoring the target system, including the kernel, and provide the needed memory protection to guarantee its integrity.